As computing and communications technologies have advanced, there has been and continues to be a globalization of market places and the expansion of business and governmental enterprises alike. The geographic limitations of sharing data and information across large spans are becoming a distant memory. Moreover, with these technological advances, computing applications which were once slated for use on stand alone machines are being deployed across, what are often, large computing environment networks and platforms. As more data and computing applications become shared, there arises a need to monitor and control the systems that house data to ensure that they are properly functioning and protect against unwanted down time which could translate into lost revenues.
An enterprise's computing environment might contain hundreds of server computers and, possibly, thousands of client computers, all in communication to share applications and application data. Such computing environment might also support vast data stores for use to store application data. Today's data stores, or databases, are designed to operate on a single stand alone machine or among several computing machines (e.g. computer database servers) and cooperate with the computing environment to accept data for storage and/or to provide data to a requesting application. Given the importance of an enterprise's data, significant efforts have and are being made to ensure that the database management applications operating to store, manage, and retrieve the data are fully operational and fully optimal. In this context, database management application providers have developed monitoring applications which are in constant communication with the database management applications so that application errors may be monitored and resolved.
A database monitoring application may be an independent application cooperating with the enterprise's computing environment or could be a component of the database management application which is utilized to monitor the various databases across the computing environment. In either case, the monitoring application operates to poll the database and associated applications for relevant operations, optimization, and communication information which may be processed by the monitoring application for display to computing environment administrators. Generally, the monitoring applications are full blown computing applications which when executed may provide a graphical user interface having various display areas to display various information about the database management applications. In addition, the graphical user interface may have navigation controls to assist in the manipulation of the displayed data.
In practice, a database administrator launches the monitoring application (and associated graphical user interface). The monitoring application engages in communications with the database management applications and databases (e.g. data stores) it is to monitor. Using messaging services, the monitoring application requests specific data from the database management applications and databases (e.g. data stores) about the operational condition and state of the database management application and/or data store. This information may include communication integrity, transaction log information, processing integrity and efficiency. Processing the retrieved information, the monitoring application, using some predefined user defined configuration variables (e.g. flag indicators and warning condition thresholds), generates monitoring information for display on the monitoring application's graphical user interface display area.
Often the graphical user interface of the monitoring application takes up the same display space as any other computing application operating on the administrators computer, such as a word processing computing application, a spreadsheet, or e-mail computing application. As such, the monitoring application is cumbersome to operate the administrator must constantly switch back between the monitoring application and other computing applications (e.g. word processor, e-mail application, etc.) to keep on top of monitoring application reports and alerts. Moreover, administrators cannot dispose of the monitoring application as it provides crucial performance and operations data required to maintain the integrity of the database management applications being monitored.
From the foregoing it is appreciated that there exists a need of systems and methods that overcome the prior art.